The Landscapes of Post-War Infrastructure: Cooling down

In this Impact and Engagement project we will produce a series of interactive experiences and use these to gather public opinions about the value of landscapes around sites of post-war infrastructure. We will present a board game for primary school children, an interactive design experience with physical and virtual components and an immersive filmic experience at Bluedot 2021, a family orientated science, arts and music festival held annually at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire.

This research is part of a larger project about the Landscapes of Post-War Infrastructure. As historians, architects and landscape architects, we know that high quality design thinking and extensive collaboration went into the production of the landscapes around sites of power stations, motorways, reservoirs in the rapid modernisation of the country after 1945. If the landscape architect did their job really well, then 60 years on, it is hard to recognise that a professional designer was even involved. Alongside the innovative design work, a substantial programme of amenity provision accompanied the development of infrastructure. All sorts of leisure were catered for in and around infrastructural sites - nature reserves, wetlands, community halls, golf courses, playgrounds, sailing clubs. As well as these formal, programmed uses, other activities have grown in and around these sites - cycling hill climbing, kit car racing, motorbike scrambling. The value of these landscapes is not just in their use though - the massive forms of gasometers, cooling towers, generator halls, dams and bridges loom large in the imagination as many had powerful presence in the landscape and they symbolise the sweeping modernisation and optimism of the post-war period. Thousands of people were employed on these sites and in the supply chains

As we move to a carbon free economy, these landscapes are being dissembled. The association between the amenities and the sites themselves is weakened and the ties that once bound communities with their landscapes through both work and play are broken. It is inevitable that these landscapes will change. In this project we want to capture and represent the design innovation as we believe it has value to the design of future infrastructural landscapes, whatever they are made from. We also want to discover what these landscapes mean to people, how they value the landscapes, as users inside the landscapes and as viewers of the landscape. We think that these views are really important in understanding the social, cultural and amenity values that landscapes of post-war infrastructure created and how these values have evolved with the sites over time.

Our eventual reporting of our findings will show new ways of visualising value and showing quantitative and qualitative data together to enrich the readings and understandings of these sites as they change and to make sure that the hidden values are adequately represented in decision making processes. In our existing network we have a range of stakeholders from industry, academia, the heritage sector and communities. We have built in some public events to our Research Network activities, but this proposal allows us to reach a much broader section of the population and to bring more voices to the research.

The immersive filmic experience will be used to engage older children and adults and will be a form of docu-tainment that uses new oral histories, archival sound and film recordings, new music, new footage to create a narrative work that speaks of the birth, life, death and afterlife of sites of infrastructure. All of the elements will be presented together at Bluedot, where, in 2019, over 19000 visitors attended. The works will be used to generate a multi-generational discourse about the intangible values of landscapes and the results will feed into our final policy advice notice.

This project will further the impact objectives of 'The Landscapes of Post-War Infrastructure' Research Network. We will build on the knowledge of the multidisciplinary academic team, experts, artists and creative writers, community groups and management teams to create a series of events. The development and presentation of the works will extend the network of artists and engage a diverse range of publics. Local schools, visitors to local museums and festival attendees at Bluedot will engage with new games and an immersive filmic experience. Through these, we will affect public understanding of values of infrastructure and their landscapes, and use this understanding at various levels of education. Through its interwoven pedagogical model, the workshops and activities of the project will help primary and secondary school children and university students to discuss and develop their understanding of infrastructure, landscape, ecology, leisure, carbon futures and well-being. The results of the workshops will be introduced at public events that will help children and families to consider the value of infrastructure and their landscapes from social, cultural, aesthetic and ecological perspectives. The workshops, immersive experience and the final artwork will engage the general public in an aspect of their cultural, landscape and architectural heritage, so contributing to their knowledge. We will also raise the public awareness of archival holdings as a means to interrogate history and futures. It will benefit archival organisations by increasing visitor numbers to archival collections and online platforms. The project will further develop the School of Architecture as a major hub for external collaborations and successes in creating impact beyond academia within their pedagogic programme. By linking the research network's multiple stakeholders with an extended audience through the involvement of local schools, artists and festivals, the project will strengthen the original research proposal's multi-agency approaches to generate new solutions to assess and safeguard the future of landscapes of infrastructure. Through this extended network this project will allow cross-cultural historic research to be placed in the context of education at various levels and art and culture to help future policy and decision-making. These will be achieved through the following Impact Objectives:
i1) Stimulating interdisciplinary discourse between academia, educational institutions, heritage and cultural sectors and artists in the production of games and immersive filmic experiences.
i2) Increasing public understanding and awareness of the elements of infrastructure, their past, present and possible futures as well as their tangible and intangible values by active engagement with novel methods of consultation.
i3) Allowing artists, researchers and policy makers to create new directions in representing the past, and therefore helping the public attending the workshops and the Festival to think differently about elements of infrastructure, its histories and futures.
i4) To engage new and diverse audiences in the findings of the multi-stakeholder research network, and through this engagement allowing the wider public to feed into a policy advisory note.
i5) To create opportunities for research-led teaching and encouraging students of the Manchester School of Architecture and Film-making to take part in a live research project with impact activities beyond academia, as well as allowing local schoolchildren to meet and collaborate with university students and museums and understand some of the types of work in both institutions.
i6) To create opportunities for recording and celebrating the 'extraordinariness of the old' and creating methods of digital preservation where the traditional policy driven presentation is not possible.
i7) To encourage the use of archive sources and museum collections in contemporary discussions about landscape futures.